Chronicles of the Aeons War, page 32
part #3 of The Omniverse Series
“There’s another reason,” he sighed, “Because there is more out there than survival. We have to go forward, as a people, as a species. Surviving the Aeons War isn’t enough. I don’t know if we can go forward; all I can tell you is how and when this war ends it will come down to you: only you can save us or destroy us; and ultimately, it’s you who decides which.”
“Don’t you know what I will decide?”
He shook his head.
“That’s after my time,” he sighed, “I can’t help you.”
♦♦♦
“The Zohor attack has left us without the necessary resources to conduct a proper search and rescue,” Fleetmistress Kaplan reported, “To proceed, we have to make hard decisions; the first must be that we concentrate on search and rescue in the densest population areas. That means in Terra Nova; in Landing, Acoma Lake, and Northfield, specifically. Acoma Lake was hit by shockwaves and the firestorm from the Zohor strike; Northfield was partially flooded following the Zohor strike in the sea of Taiga. Orbital scans show almost total devastation in Sinai and Tear. We cannot spare the resources for those locations. My Queen, isn’t there anything that you can do?”
The Shekhina Mehdi shook Her head, “What I did to the Twin Systems was too difficult; I need to recover. You’ll have to triage your operations. There’s only a few hundred left alive in all of Tear,” She said, “Most of the survivors from the Sinai were safe from the initial attack; even now, they’re completing their rescue operations. The Southlands were almost completely wiped out. Concentrate your rescue operations on Terra Nova; you will save those who can be saved; I have Seen it.” She wept as She delivered Her orders.
They were in Council Chambers in the Shrine of the Queen; for the first time since it was built the Queen of Light and Sorrow sat upon Her Throne. The Fleetmistress was reporting from the command ship above; her holographic projection and those of other delegates to the Queen’s Council “sat” with the members of the Queen’s Council who were in attendance. To Her Right sat Yeung Elysz, Her Handmaid. To the Queen’s Left, the Seat for Honoured Guests, sat the recently-arrived Grandmaster Benedict.
“Then, many more will die.” Kaplan said, “And we can expect repercussions of some kind from the survivors in Sinai.”
“I know,” the Queen answered, Her placid voice cracking, “I’ve foreseen it all. And I will live their suffering through them and with them, and I will feel their deaths as they die, just as I feel the grief and anguish and fear of those who survived. I will do this because I will not abandon any of Midian’s children. I will Remember all the Lives lost, now and forever, in My Dreams.”
Kaplan’s image bowed and touched her lips. “As you say, my Queen,” she said, “The Anuket shipyard reports salvage and repair operations are ongoing, and the Bloom’s Point Sentinel has released a thousand new ships.”
“If only we had the personnel to man the ships,” Marshall Thrask said, bitterly.
♦♦♦
The quarantine around the cleanup area was as much for public safety as to keep eyewitnesses from seeing the horror of the Purge. Sinai had maintained a state of military preparedness for hundreds of years; every citizen was required to do five years’ military service and could be called up from a reserve status at any time after that. Never in all the successive generations that had served in the Sinai Guard had anyone thought that the Abrahamic Nations would turn their military might against targets on their own soil, let alone against the Crown Cities. Dozens upon dozens of bombers flew multiple sorties over the ruins of each city before heading down the coast to blanket the surrounding areas.
They couldn’t use atomics to do the job because of the need for Reconstruction. Instead they followed an ancient chemical explosive formula which incinerated the land one section at a time, turning the debris itself into fuel for the fire. The bombing campaign took most of the week to complete. Though the season and the jet stream kept the worst of the smoke from New Rome and the other surviving cities and towns, by midweek there was black smog in the sky over the city; an acrid chemical stench, a vulgar scent from Apocalyptic Myth itself; Pomeroy Zaiola considered it the scent of their sin against those who might have been saved. That it was befouling their noses and mouths seemed only fitting to her; they should all be reminded of what had been done. The coastal cities of the Sinai had been utterly destroyed. In their place charred, molten pits stretched across the coastline for hundreds of kilometres. The smoke circled the globe and could be seen from space. And still there was no help coming from the North, no sign of concern from beyond the Blue Mountains.
Pomeroy Zaiola was far from the only person to notice the lack of response from the Northerners. Anyone now living in the shantytown surrounding the North Gate of the city of New Rome was aware of it, as were the people giving them aid and comfort; the media and the Clergy were all aware of it…the Abrahamics were people of tradition and faith, and their Rabbis, their Priests and Imams all told their flocks of the plight of the refugees, and of the silence from the people of the False Prophet, McQuire Allison:
“Were She truly of God She would have saved us, as well!” they railed, “Instead we are forsaken; why? For keeping the faith of our ancestors? For refusing to pledge ourselves to their new religion? Is that why we have been abandoned? Because we refused to bend knee to their false Queen? Her very name, Shekhina Mehdi is blasphemy!”
From the voices at the pulpits to the hearts of the people, the anger towards the Northerners and the Prophet McQuire spread...it was only a matter of days before the surviving political leaders of Sinai were obliged to take note and declare action would be taken. What action they could take, Pomeroy wasn’t exactly sure; nor was anyone else in the circle she travelled in, now. After the media’s attempt to distract from the Purge by using Pomeroy’s return from the end of Search and Rescue operations, she’d fled to her secret haunts in New Rome; places she could be anonymous and undisturbed. There was one dark, crowded coffee house between the Christian and Jewish Tierces of New Rome that she favoured above other such places. It was a meeting place of students and artists and locals in the know. It was the easiest place in which for her to disappear and to meet with the kind of people who didn’t necessarily want to be seen.
“We’re on our own,” Reardon Hiram said to the clutch of men and women around the table, “They’ve made it clear they have no need of the Children of Abraham. Our government’s requests for aid went unanswered, as will their protests. We need to send a message to the Northerners, to their fabled McQuire Allison, to her unholy El-Ahur.” He looked intently at their uncertain faces. Pomeroy suspected what Reardon was implying; she wanted to hear him say it, though.
“What sort of message do you mean?” she pressed.
“I’ve been speaking with some friends; others who worked on the rescue and recovery,” he said, “Also with friends among the Holy Orders and the Erelim. Many of us agree: we need to rally the people; we need to show them that we survived because we are strong, and because the True God is indeed on our side; our people need a show of strength, and the lack of aid from the Northerners and their El-Ahur means they need a reminder of our strength.”
“What show of strength, Reardon?” Zaiola asked again.
He looked around the table, taking in everyone with them.
“If you would be more comfortable organizing a rally,” he said to the others, “A mass demonstration to remind the people that it is not the Holy Orders or the Government that we answer to, but they to us, we shall leave you to it. We all must serve the Cause as God calls us.”
“Praise be unto Him,” a couple of them murmured, “Amen,” whispered a couple more.
“Before we go,” Reardon said, “I think I should remind you that those people out there, the refugees from the Crown Cities have lost much and are afraid and tired. They need food and proper shelter more than they need marches in the streets. If you truly want to help, make that more important than any rally. Get them food, get them water; I am available to advise you, sisters and brothers. But for now, sister Zaiola and I have to speak of other matters; and we must speak together, alone.”
They went outside and around the corner, into the alley a few paces before Pomeroy spun him against the wall.
“What was that about?” she snapped, “What the fuck are you doing, Hiram?”
“Not here, not now; you know that we have to talk about dangerous things.”
“An attack against Her Temple?” she whispered.
He shrugged. “That is the sort of thing that would remind them we are here; it would remind Her that She is not God, but His Servant. She owes us as much as She owes the rest of them; She brought us here, She created the Nephilim and Erelim; She must serve us as she does the Northerners.”
Zaiola nodded.
“I know that since the Attack you have shunned your celebrity, Zaiola. But it would be of great help to us if you made statements, if you spoke publicly.”
“My condition for that is the same: if you want my face in your campaign, you put me on the front lines of the fight; I won’t be a mascot.”
“Zai, no one’s asking you to be. But I’m not the one who can make that call; I think the ones who might be able to would like to meet you.”
“Will we finally be able to speak openly about the things that must be done?”
“I think so,” Reardon Hiram reached into his jacket and pulled out a scrap of paper on which an address was written. She was still holding him against the wall, making the task more difficult, “Come here in three days, at ten at night. Memorize the address and then destroy the paper, Zai. They want to meet you.”
“I’d like to meet them, too,”
She started to let him up from the wall and hesitated. For a fraction of a second Reardon Hiram thought she was going to kiss him; for a fraction of a second, so did she. The moment passed and she let him go, turning and walking from the alley.
“Good night, Zai,”
“Good night.”
She had the address memorized by the time she reached the pod station. There was a ten minute wait for a private pod; during that time she tore the paper in two, then in two again. She bought a bag of roasted almonds – one of the few luxuries left to them in New Rome – from the store on the pod stand and went to wait for her pod. During that time Pomeroy Zaiola ate her snack, occasionally slipping a piece of paper in with the nuts, chewing and swallowing, chewing and swallowing. By the time her pod arrived she’d nearly finished the bag, the paper long gone. She climbed into the pod and programmed her apartment in Jericho Heights into its destination. As the pod sealed and sped off, Zaiola wished she’d have had the presence of mind to buy herself some water; the salted almonds had left her thirsty.
♦♦♦
She stood on the balcony of the Queen’s Tower, watching as Heket crested the horizon to the North. She’d sensed Benedict come awake less than an hour before, been aware of him because of their imminent meeting. When She looked towards the present and near future, the time they would meet, she saw nothing but a jumble, a blur, too many possible outcomes, all of them seeming to swarm around a single constant of events. Benedict was the Catalyst, of course. Allison wondered if the Grandmaster truly understood what that meant. As important as She was to the Nai’Marak’s vile Prophecy, She could not do what She was to do, were it not for him.
Benedict was coming down the hall to Her private offices in Her Temple; a prison by any other name, She knew, was a prison nonetheless. Benedict would cross through Her vacant offices; he’d be aware that Her private rooms – what he unconsciously viewed as her nest – were on the other side of the wall. When the Grandmaster stepped through the door from Her offices onto the balcony, She was watching the sun rise, but She was acutely aware of him.
“I can’t get used to it,” She said, “Even after all this time. The sun is rising north. It curves across the sky.”
“It just reminds me how far away from Home I am,” the Grandmaster said, “But You know that; You know that I’ll always consider Earth home, even though it’s overrun and infected by the Nimbus.”
“I thought you left at the end of the war,” She said.
“That’s when I was sent away, yes. Before the final attack. Biblical, really; I wasn’t allowed to return to Earth.”
“Am I there?”
His mind was disciplined; She couldn’t see what he recalled, but She could feel his fear…his terror, nonetheless.
“You’re there,”
“Are you here to try and stop whatever it is you remember from happening?”
“I’m here to keep my promises, my Queen,” Grandmaster Benedict replied.
“What happens next, time traveler?”
“We tend to the resettlement of the refugees in Olympus. Then we’ll have ourselves a War Council.”
“Our numbers were decimated,”
“I have a way around that,”
Allison smiled; She understood instantly what Grandmaster Benedict meant, how it worked, and how it would turn the war.
“In the meantime, we have to see to the people,” She said, “We are hidden; from here we can build our fleet and raise our army.”
“Just remember: every second we spend doing so, the Zohor will be doing the same.”
♦♦♦
She tried to dress as casually and anonymously as she could: an old pair of jeans, a plain sweater and a dark jacket. She took a pod only part of the way to her destination, walking a careful, circuitous route from a station three stops away from the closest one to the address she’d been given. Pomeroy Zaiola felt afraid and embarrassed at the same time; this was a dangerous meeting and she felt at the same time as though she were overreacting, making a fool of herself; doing everything wrong while trying to be cautious. She’d always been aggressive, always been tough; her natural tendencies had always been to be assertive. She’d learned long ago how to fight, how to defend herself…but she’d never lived with any real danger. And she was Pomeroy Zaiola; starlet and celebrity. She’d cultivated her beauty and femininity along with her more martial skills; she had never learned to truly hide, to truly be invisible. Anonymity in New Rome was more of a matter of courtesy than of skill.
But surely no one – except the lowest form of newsmakers – would hope to find her in this neighbourhood. Especially not in the midst of the worst disaster in the thousand-year history of the Sinai. The address was a wire lounge: here, people with cortical implants could interconnect in a mass unconscious experience; a computer-generated dreamstate. Reardon met her with a man and a woman she didn’t recognize. They led her through to the back of the lounge. Zaiola shuddered as she walked past row after row of sleeping people, reclined in ergofoam chairs. Wire bundles were plugged into their heads at their temples. The Orthodoxy of all three Branches of the Abrahamic Faith were opposed to cortical implants on moral, religious and even hygienic grounds. Zaiola’s family were conservative, not Orthodox to be sure; the interfaces were practical – when used appropriately. While her father and two of her sisters had interfaces, the idea of wiring a computer into her brain made Zaiola uncomfortable. The idea of all these minds wired together, open and mixed in with everyone else’s, their conscious and subconscious manifestations blending together made her skin crawl.
“How can we meet here?”
“Because it’s the last place anyone would look for such a meeting.” The woman accompanying them replied. They led her down a flight of stairs to a narrow hallway. This was an older section of building, built into the foundations of the newer structure above. There were thousands of such hideaways and lost buildings buried under successive layers of the city of New Rome as it had been modeled and remodelled over the long centuries of its life. Some spoke of entire lost towns, complete with streets and standing structures. Just a few years before Pomeroy had starred in a tale of one such hidden world beneath New Rome. This, however, she realized was far removed from the sets and stories she’d played in cinema.
The hallway they followed was short, with only a few closed doors. One obviously a janitorial closet, another had the cloying disinfectant smell of a toilet. At the far end was a larger, heavier door. They went through it and down an old, mouldered passage and into large suite beyond. She could have been in her father’s den back in their old home in Barat El-Mecca if not for the bricked-over windows. Tapestries from the Three Faiths hung alongside shelves of books, histories and stories from the Old Earth and from Humankind’s time on Midian. Low, semicircular couches surrounded a round table on three sides of a sunken lounge area, while an office and a coffee bar held the back of the low-lit room. A group seven men and women sat around the couches; most of them were older, two had the bearing of the Priesthoods. The man and woman that came with Pomeroy and Reardon stayed by the door. Reardon approached the table, Pomeroy following behind. She only caught half of what Reardon said to the gathering before sitting down. One of the older men beckoned to her.
